Athens at 4am is not so hot, but the people are great!

Athens Travel Blog

For Athens I have a biased opinion, we went the year before the Olympics so there was a brand new subway which was stunning and sparkled, literally, the stations looked like museums with historical displays and such. But... there were maybe half a dozen stops and only one took us near the hotel... Did I mention that we arrived at 4am? So, tired, hours before we could check into the hotel and no sleep on the plane of course... we decided to find the Acropolis (the spot of the main temples on top of a mountain in pretty much the center of Athens) before we checked in. So, we started following the signs... it took us in a circle. Now, to this day I'm not sure if it was because we were so dead tired or because they posted the signs left and right rather than pointing up, but we walked around in circles again and again in the early hours of the morning.

The bus we took to the middle of no where...

Ended up hopping on a bus which took us out past Athens to where the Olympics stadium was being built and figured we'd not gone in the right direction so we hopped back on another bus with the workers who were off shift and headed home and ended up out the other end of Athens where we were over looking the sea ports at a bus terminal where the bus stopped... for a few hours. So, we got out, and walked down to where the drivers were all cooking a big kebab. They were super nice and even though we couldn't speak Greek and they knew no English we were offered breakfast with them and they gave us a bus number. It's possibly my best memory of Athens. We didn't get to spend a lot of time there as we were at the time working with weekends open to us only. Thanks to the super nice bus drivers we made it to the Acropolis around 10am where we accidentally joined a French tour group of the ruins... I'm still not sure how that happened either. We ventured off on our own inside and ended up pretty much alone looking over the city, walking on the marble paths where the ancients worshiped their Gods, it was amazing. When we left we decided to stop with the buses and grabbed a cab to the hotel... which was basically across the street, oops. It was a good time all and all.